Zedstrian

Is Soulseek mainly for music, rather than audiobooks? Tried to search for audiobooks on my to-find list but no dice.

Without port forwarding, torrent clients can only connect to a fraction of the total number of seeders.

The best way to build ratio on TorrentLeech regardless of one's download or upload bandwidth is to use about 2GB of the initial 15GB given to new accounts to download 100 torrents that are at least 15MB, subsequently seeding those torrents 24/7 to maximize continuous TL point gain. After getting enough points you can use them to boost your ratio.

It's unreasonable in the context that while streaming services were intended to be an affordable alternative to cable without sacrificing content variety, having the same level of variety now requires four or five subscriptions. Not an issue unique to Disney, but they and other movie studios have hiked movie rental costs, along with maintaining unreasonable pricing for BluRay releases, as a means of inflating the valuation of their IP catalog.

The fact that — in contrast to having four or five subscriptions over the span of two years— it's economical to run one's own 16TB or 32TB capacity media server (and even subsequently pay for replacement hard drives as needed) demonstrates that the subscription platforms, able to run such servers far more economically per user than anyone can do themselves, are retaining excessively high profit margins in contrast to the compensation paid to the people actually involved in producing content.

Guess I'll have to see if it's available anywhere then; thanks for the suggestion!

Definitely true; while it would have been more fun setting up something like a Pi4 with Plasma Bigscreen to avoid content ecosystems, it seems that choosing between a Google TV or Fire TV stick or a USB-supporting BluRay player will be a more economical option. Haven't delved much into custom launchers before, but it seems that might be a good solution for the sort of minimalistic UI I'm looking for.

Good point; something I'll have to try before I decide on buying anything. Problem with some media players could be the lack of support for changing between audio and subtitle tracks on the fly for multilingual support, so in both the case of the TV itself and anything I plan on buying I'll have to do more research first I guess, since unfortunately Amazon listings are often bereft of non surface-level technical specs.

While I certainly have a budget, the problem with the lowest-end Google TV / Android TV devices is that while they work fine for their intended purpose of streaming, they're less likely to flawlessly support the most demanding of video codecs while processing video output locally via VLC or another media player.

Unfortunately it's a relatively new TV that just happens to not be a smart one. Having helped my other relatives pick an inexpensive Google TV powered smart TV specifically for its VLC compatibility, I would have preferred to have done the same in this case, but hopefully I can find something that'll work all the same.

I can imagine the phone-to-roku streaming method working well, particularly given the simplicity of Roku OS, though in terms of USB drive usage, past testing on a dedicated Roku TV has been mixed in terms of codec compatibility, unfortunately.